Assassination of Indira Gandhi (1984) and Operation Blue Star

The assassination of Indira Gandhi took place on the morning of 31 October 1984, when the prime minister of India was shot dead by two of her Sikh bodyguards in the garden of her residence in New Delhi. The killing was an act of revenge for Operation Blue Star, the army assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984.

Her death was followed by days of violence against Sikhs in which thousands were killed, mostly in Delhi. Her son Rajiv Gandhi succeeded her and led the Congress party to a landslide election victory weeks later.

Background: Indira Gandhi and Punjab

Indira Gandhi, daughter of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, led the country from 1966 to 1977 and again from January 1980. She was a dominant and divisive figure, remembered for India’s victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan and for the Emergency of 1975–1977, when civil liberties were suspended.

In Punjab, the only Indian state with a Sikh majority, the Akali Dal party pressed for greater autonomy, water rights and other demands set out in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973. In the early 1980s the charismatic preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale became the leading voice of a more radical movement. Violence grew, including killings of Hindus, moderate Sikhs and police officers, and some militants called for an independent Sikh state, Khalistan.

From late 1983 Bhindranwale and armed followers occupied and fortified the Akal Takht, the seat of Sikh religious authority inside the Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) complex. Negotiations between the government and Akali leaders failed.

Operation Blue Star

In early June 1984 Gandhi ordered the army to clear the complex. Troops under Major General Kuldip Singh Brar surrounded the temple, and the main assault took place on the night of 5–6 June. The defenders, trained in part by a former army general, Shabeg Singh, put up fierce resistance, and the army eventually used tanks against the Akal Takht.

Bhindranwale and Shabeg Singh were killed. The government’s white paper gave the dead as 83 soldiers and 493 militants and civilians; other estimates put the total in the low thousands, since many pilgrims had gathered for the anniversary of the martyrdom of Guru Arjan. The Akal Takht was badly damaged and the Sikh Reference Library was burned.

The operation caused deep anger among Sikhs in India and abroad. Prominent Sikhs returned state honours, and some Sikh soldiers mutinied. Officials warned that Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards might be a risk, but she reportedly refused to remove them, saying that India was a secular country.

The assassination

On the morning of 31 October 1984, Gandhi walked from her residence at 1 Safdarjung Road towards her adjoining office at 1 Akbar Road, where she was due to be interviewed by the British actor Peter Ustinov for an Irish television documentary. At about 9.20 a.m., at a wicket gate on the path, Sub-Inspector Beant Singh drew his revolver and shot her. Constable Satwant Singh then fired the full magazine of his Sten sub-machine gun into her as she lay on the ground.

The two men dropped their weapons. They were taken to a guardroom, where Beant Singh was shot dead and Satwant Singh seriously wounded by other security personnel. Gandhi was rushed to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where doctors tried for hours to save her. She was declared dead in the afternoon, aged 66. Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister that evening.

The anti-Sikh riots

As news of the killing spread, mobs attacked Sikhs, their homes, businesses and gurdwaras in Delhi and many other cities from 31 October to 3 November. Men and boys were beaten and burned alive, often in front of their families. Official figures put the dead at about 2,800 in Delhi and about 3,350 across India; independent estimates are higher.

Several official inquiries, including the Nanavati Commission of 2005, found that local politicians of the ruling Congress party had helped organise or incite some of the mobs and that the police had failed to act. In 2005 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologised in parliament for the violence. Prosecutions came slowly, and some politicians were convicted decades later.

Key people

• Indira Gandhi (1917–1984): prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 until her death, and the country’s first and so far only woman to hold the office.
• Beant Singh: a sub-inspector of the Delhi Police who had served in her personal guard for some years; he fired the first shots and was killed in custody minutes later.
• Satwant Singh: a young constable who had joined her security detail only months earlier; he fired the sub-machine gun and was later tried and executed.
• Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947–1984): head of the Damdami Taksal religious seminary and leader of the armed militants in the Golden Temple, killed during Operation Blue Star.
• Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991): her elder son, a former airline pilot drawn into politics after his brother Sanjay’s death in 1980, who succeeded her as prime minister.

Trial and aftermath

Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh, an uncle of Beant Singh, were convicted of murder and conspiracy and hanged in Tihar Jail in Delhi on 6 January 1989. A third accused, Balbir Singh, was acquitted on appeal.

Gandhi was cremated on 3 November 1984 near the Yamuna River in Delhi, at a site later named Shakti Sthal. In the general election of December 1984, held weeks after her death, the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi won more than 400 of the 514 seats contested, its largest ever majority. Rajiv was himself assassinated by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber in 1991, during the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Militancy in Punjab continued for almost a decade. Sikh extremists bombed Air India Flight 182 in June 1985, killing 329 people, and killed the former army chief General Arun Vaidya, who had overseen Blue Star, in 1986. The insurgency was largely suppressed by the early 1990s.

Myths and facts

A common belief is that the 1984 violence against Sikhs was a spontaneous outburst of public grief. Civil liberties groups that investigated at the time, and later the Nanavati Commission, found evidence of organisation in several areas: mobs were brought in by vehicle, supplied with kerosene and weapons, and in some cases led by local political figures who knew where Sikh families lived. The police in many districts stood by or intervened late, and the army was deployed in the capital only after several days.

Timeline

• 1980, January: Indira Gandhi returns to power.
• 1983, December: Bhindranwale moves into the Akal Takht.
• 1984, 5–6 June: Main army assault on the Golden Temple complex.
• 1984, 31 October: Indira Gandhi is assassinated; Rajiv Gandhi is sworn in.
• 1984, 31 October – 3 November: Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and elsewhere.
• 1984, 3 November: Indira Gandhi is cremated in Delhi.
• 1984, December: Congress wins a landslide general election.
• 1989, 6 January: Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh are hanged.

Why it matters

The assassination of Indira Gandhi was one of the most traumatic events in independent India’s history, comparable in its shock to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Together with Operation Blue Star and the riots that followed, it left a long legacy of grief and mistrust among Sikhs and remains a sensitive subject in Indian politics. The same year also brought the Bhopal gas tragedy, making 1984 one of India’s darkest years.